Ben Whalley’s latest four-part music doc has lined up some heavyweight interviewees to recall that far off time in the early 1960s when America was still a very long way away.

For a young Jimmy Page, America was a mystical land, only glimpsed through the lyrics of Chuck Berry songs – a mecca of music, attitude and hamburgers.

“Whether it was, or whether it wasn’t, this is what we all believed,” he says.

And then the Beatles got off a plane in New York and the place went nuts. There have been plenty of words written about Beatlemania hitting the US, but this digs a bit deeper to examine the culture clash between crew-cuts and mop-tops and what happened next to change music in the following decade.

Sir Paul McCartney explains how he found the youth of America to be a year behind the UK. Pop music for them meant clean-cut crooners, who were mostly called Bobby.

This film argues that the Beatles – and the wave of British bands that quickly followed – plugged American music back into the old energy of rock ’n’ roll.

But the conquering young Brits were as clueless about the Americans as they were about us.

Beyond New York, they discovered that the realities of America actually included men who still dressed like cowboys and shops where you could buy guns or Ku Klux Klan records.

And the Americans’ view of Britain still remained hilariously skewed. It was an image the Yardbirds were happy to play up to as we see in a clip of them performing For Your Love wearing suits of armour and Elizabethan costume.